| Then your affiliate link would be www.affiliatelife.com/cyberbooks.
Say the highjacker uses the affiliate ID of captain-hook. What he would do is replace your ID with his, and buy from the URL www.affiliatelife.com/captain-hook.
Bypassing is what happens when someone sees an affiliate link and is either unfamiliar and uncomfortable with it, or just cant stand the idea of your getting a commission (even though youve done the work to put the information in front of them).
So instead of buying from www.affiliatelife.com/cyberbooks, the bypasser will simply chop off the affiliate ID at the end and simply buy from the plain URL www.affiliate.com --without your affiliate ID attached!
The bottom line: You dont get your commission, and the hijacker puts your money in his pocket, in the form of a discount, by buying through his own affiliate link. Unfortunately, as long as people can see an affiliate code in the link that you offer them, a certain number of them are destined to hijack it or bypass it.
If youre using PayPal to sell digital products check your source code. In that code is the link to your thank you page which many people use as the download page for their digital product. All someone has to do is copy that link in your source code and voila, theyre at your download page without having to pay for your product!
Your best bet to overcome this problem is to do some research and find some software that will cloak your affiliate links or hide your code.
This is something you should take care of before you start losing money!
About The Author
Bob Bishop is the publisher of the free Traffic Tip of the Day newsletter.
http://www.internettraffictips.com
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This article was posted on November 14, 2002 |
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